2312 (44 page)

K
iran’s new work unit began regularly driving a rover back and forth from one of Lakshmi’s locked compounds in Cleopatra to the new town Vinmara, always passing Stupid Harbor on the way. Vinmara was still growing like a mussel bed around its shallow empty bay, and off to the south through the drifting snowfall they could see the silver glitter of the dry ice sea.

After one of these runs, when they were back in Cleopatra, Kiran ran into Kexue in a game bar they both frequented, and the voluble small said, “Come meet a friend of mine. You’ll like him.”

It turned out to be Shukra, beard and hair long and gray; he looked like a wandering mendicant. Kexue grinned as Kiran recognized the man. “I told you you’d like him.”

Kiran mumbled something awkward.

“It’s all right,” Shukra said, staring hard at him. “You were bait, I told you that. And you got taken. So now I’m here to tell you what to do next. Lakshmi’s got you on the route between her compound here and that coastal town, right?”

“That’s right,” Kiran said. He could see how he probably still owed his first Venusian contact his services, but it was becoming all too clear to him how dangerous it was to play both sides. He didn’t want to cross Lakshmi in any way; on the other hand, this man did not seem like someone to be trifled with either. Indeed at the moment there was no way to deny him. “There’s shipments going both directions, but we don’t see what gets loaded.”

“I want you to find out what it is. Insinuate yourself further into the situation, and then let me know what you find.”

“How will I contact you?”

“You won’t. I’ll contact you.”

So after that, feeling deeply uneasy, Kiran kept his eye out when they were making the Vinmara run. It became clearer than ever to him that the transport crew was not intended to know the contents of their rovers; there were guards on every run, and the office in central Vinmara was as closed to outsiders as the various facilities in Cleopatra. The rovers backed up to a loading dock and interfaced with the building, and after a while drove away, and that was it. Once, when an exceptionally deep snowfall delayed them mid-route, Kiran listened without watching as the guard in their cab had a phone conversation that seemed to be with people in the storage compartment of the rover; they spoke Chinese, and later Kiran had his translation spectacles translate the recording it had made:

“Are you okay back there?”

“We’re fine. They’re fine.”

They? Anyway, it was something to tell Shukra, if he reappeared.

A
s it happened, they were down in Vinmara when the big blizzard finally stopped. The skies cleared; the stars in all their glory punctured the black dome of the sky. Naturally they joined the whole town in suiting up and going out the city gates onto the bare hills above the town. The continuous deluge of snow and sleet and hail and rain had gone on for three years and three months. Now everyone wanted to see what things looked like under the stars.

Almost all the landscape they could see was covered by snow, gleaming in the starlight. Many spiky points of black rock broke through this gleaming white—the land surrounding the town
must have been a devil’s golf course of
aa
or something like it—and the result was that over their heads the black sky spangled with brilliant stars, while under their feet the white hills were spattered by spiky black outcroppings, so that the two together looked like photographic negatives of each other.

And now they could breathe the open air. It was screamingly cold, of course, so as people pulled off their helmets they did scream, casting brief plumes of frost from their open mouths. Breathable air—a nitrogen-argon-oxygen mix, at seven hundred millibars, and ten degrees below. It was like breathing vodka.

The snow underfoot was too hard to dig out snowballs, and people were falling as they skidded this way and that. Out on the hilltop above the town they could see for huge distances in all directions.

It was around noon, and among the stars overhead hung the black circle of the eclipsed sun. A black cutout in the sky—the sunshield, letting through no sunlight—except for today, when there was a scheduled uneclipse. These uneclipses had been happening once a month for a while now, to help heat things back up to a more human-friendly level, but no one on the planet had been able to see them because the rain and snow had blocked the view. Now there would be one they would be able to see.

Many people were putting their helmets back on; the reality of the cold was setting in. Kiran’s nose was numb, while his ears were still burning as they froze. People said you could break frozen ears right off, and now he believed it. Music was playing from loudspeakers down in the town, something clangorous with cymbals and bells, very Slavic, very violent and loud.

Then directly overhead the sunshield was suddenly marked by a perfectly circular thread of diamond light, blazing near the edge of the black disk. Though this annular ring was a mere wire of brilliant yellow, a delicate hoop of fire, it still lit up the white hills and the scalloped town, and the silver sea to the south, and the
plumes of frost pouring from their cheering throats, all glowing now with a bronze light that brought back memories of all the sunniness they had ever known or dreamed of. The burnished tinge was like the light of life itself, a light they had almost forgot, all brought back now by the yellow air.

After a frigid hour the ring of fire grew thinner and thinner, eclipsing from its inside out, until the disk of the sun became completely black again. The circular venetian blind had closed its opened slat. The snowy land darkened to its usual pale luminosity; the stars grew big again. Full night was back, in all its grim familiarity. Just above the black disk of the sun a bright white planet gleamed, small but steady: Mercury, Kiran was told. They were seeing Mercury from Venus, and it gleamed like a pearl made of diamond. And there over the western horizon hung Earth and Luna too, a double star with a blue tinge. “Wow,” Kiran said; something in him seemed to be blowing up like a balloon. Had to breathe deep or he might pop.

But his teammates were tugging at his arm. “Earth boy! Earth boy! Bye-bye miss America pie! We must get back in town fast, there’s a rover broken down, Lakshmi want us right now!”

“Lead on!” Kiran cried, and followed them back down the hillside to the open gates of Vinmara.

Just inside the city gate they followed phone instructions to the rover that was in distress. It looked exactly like their own. The driver and a trio of security people were standing by it, very unhappy; the rover had lost all power, and some packages needed to be run over to the office in the town center as quickly and discreetly as possible. Kiran stood in a short line with his teammates and took a big flat box passed down from one of the security people, thinking that this might be his opportunity to find out what was being transported. Then they were off across town in a little line, like porters.

The town was almost empty, its residents still out on the hill
celebrating. The box Kiran was carrying weighed about five kilos; it was not exceptionally heavy for its size. There was a keypad lock on it, near the hasp, that made it look like a reinforced briefcase. They were not far from the office. The actual hinges of the case looked little and flimsy, and he wondered what would happen if he accidentally dropped it on its hinge side.

But then the security trio from the disabled rover appeared, crying, “Run! Run! Get to the office now!” looking over their shoulders fearfully with their guns drawn. Everyone bolted, and Kiran, following the others, seeing they were rattled, shifted the briefcase in his hands so that its hinges were out to his side. When his mates turned a corner to run down a narrow alley, he pretended to trip, and slammed the case hard into the corner of a wall, right against the hinges.

The case held solid.

“Oh shit! Did you break them?” someone exclaimed from behind him—one of the security guards—a Chinese tall, standing over him now, looking horrified.

“What, are they eggs?” Kiran asked as he got up.

“Like eggs,” the guard said, taking the box up and punching away at its keypad. “And if they’re broken, we better leave town.” The top of the box lifted, and there in individual clear containers lay a dozen human eyeballs—all of them, by coincidence, Kiran assumed, staring right at him.

The space project accelerated as it was becoming clear that Earth was in for a terrible time because of the climate change and general despoliation of the biosphere. Going into space looked like an attempt to escape all that, and there was enough truth in this that defenders of the space project always had to emphasize its humanitarian and environmental value, the ways in which the resources available in the solar system might help Earth limp through its stupendous overshoot. Inhabiting the other bodies of the solar system could be said to conform to the Leopoldian land ethic, “what’s good is what’s good for the land,” because it was going to take stuff from space to save Earth

first settlements on Luna, Mars, and the asteroids were so expensive that they were made as international or national projects, using public money. This made them pitifully weak through the years of dithering, but following the construction of the first space elevators, they blossomed, and by the time of the Accelerando they were ready to take center stage—ready to be the landscape of the Accelerando

Mars was the first to be terraformed, and compared to those that followed, it was very easy. Early on the decision was made to proceed as quickly as possible. Thousands of explosions were set off in the regolith (it was said this would help the Martian life-forms buried in the lithosphere), and much of the surface of the planet
was burned, in lines that later served as beds for the planet’s famous canals. The burning created an atmosphere, and the planet’s ice was mined and melted such that a narrow northern ocean and a Hellas Sea were filled. Little to no regard was taken for the primordial surface, and yet it was also true that the vertical scale of the planet’s topography protected the highest parts of the landscape from much alteration, leaving it as a kind of primeval park

a mass influx of immigrants from Earth quickly melded into a polyglot community that within two generations thought of itself as intrinsically and fundamentally Martian,
Homo ares
, and as such, a political unit independent of Earth by nature and by right. The entire population agreed to secede from all Terran associations, afterward reorganizing under a new constitution that stipulated a single planetary government and an economic system variously labeled socialist, communist, utopian, democratic-state-anarchic, syndicalist, worker cooperative, libertarian socialist, and any number of other labels from the past, all of which were rejected by Martian political theorists, who preferred the adjective “martian” or “areological.” As a new socioeconomic system with a newly created biosphere to work in, Mars was a socio-physical power the equal of any single Earth nation or alliance and in many ways, because of its unity, the equal of all the rest of balkanized humanity combined

fears were stoked when Mars in the first flush of independence began to strip the nitrogen from Titan’s atmosphere for return to Mars, without regard for the opinions of the people already in the Saturn system, admittedly few in number. Around this same time (2176–2196), Chinese teams dismantled Saturn’s moon Dione in order to redirect it to Venus as part of the initial terraformation there. In the disruption on Earth following the Little Ice Age of the 2140s, there was no power on Earth large enough to challenge
the Chinese over this distant move. But these two events around Saturn together stimulated the creation of the Saturn League, which over time managed to assert sovereignty over the whole Saturn system—although it is true that the threat of a traumatic Saturn-Mars war, Saturn’s phantom war of independence, as some called it—was needed to finalize the assertion

Earth’s moon, Luna, never achieved independence, but was always divided into cities and regions controlled by various Terran powers. It would have been difficult to fully terraform Luna in any case, because hitting it with asteroids to spin it and give it an atmosphere was considered too likely to subject Earth to a tektite rain of potentially great severity. It was also true that metals and useful chemicals in lunar rock could be mined only by a deep strip-mining and processing of much of the lunar surface, which also made terraforming difficult. So large domed craters and tented areas alternated with cosmologically large mining pits, and each nation with a substantial lunar presence had an influx of raw materials. China’s early investment on Luna led directly to its influence over Venus, because the Venus sunshield was a product of the lunar Chinese industrial bases. At the same time many other Terran nations established lunar bases, and the political unification of Luna became impossible. Some locate the origins of the Balkanization to this development, although most see qubical decoherence and the sheer size of the solar system as the key

balkanization is of course the subject of great disagreement, with judgments of it ranging from its being the newly lowest circle of hell to its representing the delectable and fructifying diversification of life in our time

success is failure. The Accelerando spread all the weakness, disease, and crime embedded in the Terran system of that era, and
once spread that widely, they could never be contained. Pandora’s box had been

by the beginning of the twenty-fourth century the Mondragon Accord had organized a third force to join the Earth-Mars dyad, and the Jovian and Saturnian leagues provided major counterweights as well. A situation of this much diplomatic complexity brought back talk of a “balance of powers,” of the “great game,” of a “cold war,” and so on: all ideas from earlier eras, again haunting us as they have a wont to do, hungry ghosts deceiving us with their false analogies, laying their dead hands on our living eyes! Ultimately the Balkanization was by its scope and special nature a new thing